UK unveils ‘Humphrey’ assistant for civil servants with further plans for AI to reduce bureaucracy

A week after the UK government announced A Sweeping plan To make significant investments in AI, it lays out more detail on how this will look in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; Data sharing deals across siled departments; And a new set of artificial intelligence tools – dubbed “Humphrey” after a character who appeared in an old UK TV political sitcom – to speed up the work of civil servants.

The plans will be formally unveiled at a press conference on Tuesday chaired by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), along with two other departments, Work and Pensions and Health/Social Care.

If you move to UK Government Artificial Intelligence website To check out the progress of some projects, you’ll see that most of the efforts so far appear to be in very early stages, either in limited trials or a testing phase; Others are more modern. For example, the plan to bring more AI services to the customer-facing side of the NHS is still in the “Charter“Commitment to the concept.

Some of them include links to Github repositories to check out some of the work so far. It is not clear how many people are working on these projects, nor what third-party tools (such as LLMs) are used. (We’ve asked these questions and will update as we learn more.)

At its core, projects are about efficiency. The government currently spends around £23 billion a year on technology, and the idea would be to redistribute this money in a more modern way, DSIT said.

“Slow technology has hampered our public services for too long, and is costing us all a fortune in time and money… not to mention the headaches and stress we suffer after being suspended or forced to take a trip to fill the gap,” Peter Kyle, Minister of State for DSIT, said in a statement. Form. “My department will put AI to work… We will use technology to strongly challenge the public sector’s irrational approach to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves.”

Plans include a new team within DSIT to head up projects, somewhat similar to Doug In the US but were designed and run by government people rather than tech tycoons.

DSIT focuses on three areas initially:

1. The work of government employees. Humphrey, named after A sarcastic and intelligent assistant Played by the late Nigel Hawthorne in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, it is a set of applications aimed at reducing the typical daily workload of civil servants, specifically in terms of the huge amount of data they have to read and process as part Of their work.

Consult is designed to read and summarize “thousands” of responses to consultations in hours (the responses, which can be long and numerous, are a key part of how the government takes stakeholder and public feedback into account). Parlex will allow them to query and read conversations in Parliament relevant to bills or other policy documents they are working on. Minute is a secure transcription service for taking notes from many hours of meetings. Redbox helps them prepare briefings and policy documents. Lex allows them to refer to relevant legal data.

2. Another aspect of enhancing efficiency will revolve around accelerating public services. The idea here is to target outdated bureaucracy, of which there is a lot in the UK, such as the 100,000 calls the tax authorities receive every day, the need for people to turn up in person to register a death, or (bizarrely) placing advertisements in the local newspaper as part of the process of obtaining a driving licence. a truck.

DSIT’s thinking is that overhauling such processes with more AI-powered automation could save £45 billion a year. (It is not clear whether this estimate is before or after deducting the cost of building and operating the AI ​​services.)

3. The final area will focus on more cross-departmental collaboration to help share data to speed up how services are purchased, and therefore how they work.

Taken together, the various projects are a sign that the government appears interested in its new AI efforts. But they also raise a number of questions.

For example, in the case of data sharing, the ICT Department currently says that the operating idea here would be a “common sense approach to information sharing”. Central government departments, such as HMRC and the Department for Business and Trade, for example, can share data with each other and with local councils in fraud investigations, or to better understand how businesses operate and what programs might help them. But what happens to individuals’ data protection when data is shared in ways you may not have intended?

Another potential question revolving around Humphrey: Right now, DSIT said some of the early applications are only in the testing stages, but the big question will be, how far will the government go in trusting some of the AI’s conclusions?

There will also be more humanitarian challenges. As a former government employee (now working in an AI company) Notesprevious efforts to create cross-departmental programs have not always been successful. Collaboration, money, and power are ultimately the tools that will make or break any of these plans.